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puddingebola writes "John Morris at CNET offers a brief review of PC Android devices, many of them hybrids running Windows 8 and Android. From the article, 'Microsoft has spent a lot of time and effort trying to get Windows onto smartphones and tablets — so far without a whole lot to show for it. Now several PC companies are trying the opposite approach, taking the Android operating system and porting it to PCs.' The article reviews the recent releases from HP, Acer, Asus, and Samsung. Does Android creeping onto desktop or 'traditional' PC devices have any kind of possible long term consequences? Could this be a way for Android and Google to develop a larger presence in corporate IT, or could Android ever really supplant the Windows foothold?"

My MK808 works perfectly as a media center for my TV. I have various nfs/samba shares mounted on it and run XBMC with a mirror of my desktop library database. Planning to upgrade to an MK908 quad core when the price comes down a bit and the bugs in the firmware are ironed out. As for a desktop system I could see it working for most folks, however the way that android manages apps would need to be reworked a bit to accommodate non-touch interfaces.. assuming these don't become desktop standard.

Android is a terrific desktop OS. I have all my tools within a few clicks, including Splashtop streaming to either my desktop or PC (even streaming at 2560x1400 resolution works beautifully to my nexus 10). I also have both the mk808 and (recently) the quad-core mk908 which does many things FAR faster than Windows or MacOS-X. Browsing, checking e-mail, tweaking photos (PS Mobile), listening to music, editing code, etc. IMHO, Android is the sleek, fast desktop Linux OS we've all wished would happen. All that needs to happen is a way to host chroot-like gnome/kde environments and HW-accelerated integrated X11 server.
btw, anyone considering either the mk808 or mk908 - go with the mk908 - it's not just faster but includes bluetooth, a big convenience with low-power USB-powered device with limited USB ports - also, there's lots of cool bluetooth hardware supported on android like ELM327 interfaces that interact with your car.

All that needs to happen is a way to host chroot-like gnome/kde environments and HW-accelerated integrated X11 server.

Bah, not even that. I just tried out the android-x86 4.2.2 ISO just a few days ago, and I'd be happy if it just saw the NTFS partition on the HD. (plus Printing support, there's a app for my printer, but it sucks bad)

VLC works fine, mozilla was snappy, and the play store knew what apps would work!

I think that android would be awesome as a primary OS option, I don't even miss minimizing stuff, they have a task switcher that works fast enough.

Usurper? Seriously? Firstly, Android is by many people's definitions more free than regular desktop Linux because it's licensed under a more permissive license.

Secondly, Android is actually a "desktop" Linux done right, by people who know what they're doing. As a disclaimer, I worked on desktop Linux related projects for years, about a decade ago. I wrote patches for GNOME, for ALSA, for Wine, and I also built an entire packaging and installer framework that tried to abstract out the differences between distributions so people could distribute their own applications without getting stuck into the swamp of distributor packaging (which was and always will be a shit idea). Many other things that I've forgotten about.

It was all a waste of time. Fundamentally, desktop Linux was not designed or built, it evolved organically. Any attempt to bring people together who might have some skill in OS design resulted in endless stupid flamewars and politics (does anyone remember the ridiculous KDE vs freedesktop wars?). The moment the community needed to move beyond the design laid out by the original creators of UNIX it all fell apart and became a mess.

Android is the best of all worlds - it's Free as in Freedom, it's managed centrally by a highly experienced team of computer scientists and OS designers (some of whom came from working on BeOS), the basic design decisions in it are correct - there's no crap whereby every phone manufacturer has to package every end user application. Heck you can see how popular with users it is just to have them distributing the core OS, you can imagine the disaster zone that'd occur if they used the Debian model. There's one audio API, that works. There's one graphics API, that works. It's standardised on one reasonably modern language, which works. No "we have to rewrite this from C++ into C for political reasons" garbage there.

Frankly it's a breath of fresh air and if it eventually wipes out traditional desktop Linux distros, you won't see me shed a tear despite all the work I did.

In a Slashdot comment, "nobody cares" is likely to mean "not enough people care to create economies of scale." Small budget laptops running GNU/Linux, for example, were a commercial failure because the supermajority of users turned out to expect Windows. (That and the fact that a lot of these netbooks shipped with launchers even more horrible than some people make Ubuntu Unity or GNOME Shell out to be.)

Most people just need a thin client to access Facebook/Gmail/Amazon.com/Pintrest, Youtube and the 2-3 specialty sites, pay bills and let junior type up his book report. The needs of people who post here are vastly different from 95% of the population.

An Android device the size of a thumb drive that plugs in to the back of their living room TV and works with their bluetooth keyboard/mouse is more powerful than many people will ever need.

Yes, thats what many "end of the desktop" proponents dont seem to understand. Even if these mobile operating systems satisfied 95% of the things people often do with a computer, most people would still have their own 5% niche need that the mobile OS is completely inappropriate for and the device hardware itself completely under-powered for.

You have to wonder how tech-literate these "end-of-the-desktop" proponents really are, since clearly they are just consumers of data at most. of course they will challenge you to give them some reason for desktops and you will of course give them a specific answer, and they will of course say that only 5% of people do that.. an argument that ignores the fact that my 5% is different from your 5% is different from someone elses 5%.... but most people have a 5%.

I've tried living without a PC for a year. I own an android tablet and an iphone.

Mostly, I'm just constantly annoyed and pissed off all the time. I can do things on the go, which is great. But I can't do much of anything beyond email, facebook, watch a movie or play a game or a hundred other non-productive things. Typing is frustrating, the interface is a kiosk so I really can't move windows and transfer any data between them. If someone hasn't written software for the task you need you're just out of luck.

The only truly useful and productive thing I can do is browse the web to research something.

The same people that call for the end of the desktop have a vastly different perspective from you. You are not a worker or a designer. From a tech journalist's perspective you are nothing more than a consumer. You are consuming their ideas and getting them ad impressions. This device they are talking about is perfect for doing that! Their use of an object is more hopeful than yours, because it's their job to sell you the product. Most people simply don't have time to square peg and round hole the tablet into their needs, of which there are many.

With a docking station a Galaxy Note 2 is more than powerful enough for web browsing / MS Office / email type stuff.

Since when is Microsoft Office ported to Android? I thought mobile Microsoft Office was exclusive to Windows Phone and Windows RT, just as Halo 3 is exclusive to Xbox 360. Even the port of LibreOffice can't be released yet because it's too big for Google Play Store [arstechnica.com].

Actually most of the people that I know and support, i.e. not into consoles/PC-Gaming-Rig-From-Hell (should that be a new acronym?), do just fine with the games on their tablets/phones/etc under Android and iOS. I have yet another self-designed rig from hell here except it has nothing to do with gaming. I do complex analysis/simulations so the "gaming video-cards" are a bit of a super-computer here.

Just a random thought but since MS has introduced the concept of a portable work environment (Windows-To-

If I had a beefy server with a bunch of GPUs in it, so I can stream video graphics (similar to OnLive except running on the LAN), then for everything else, use the server with something like Citrix XenApp. That way, the desktop computer does relatively little work while the server is the machine that gets secured. Since most infections come from compromised websites, having the Web browsing done under Android will help reduce [1] the incidences of infection.

I've set one up for my parents, they like it well enough:- it is much more reliable than their Windows PC (which lost the 'net while I was away, so was useless for a couple of weeks)- it is easier to use, once you learn the 5 differences (single click to launch, right click = back, Home =... home,...)- it does what they need: mail, internet, Skype, and a few games. Oh, and picture frame:-p With widgets, they have mail + meteo + skype contacts and conversations right on the home screen.- plays games and f

Perhaps, once somebody bodges together an actually-working set of management tools for Android.

Are Wintels brutally overpowered and needlessly complex for many purposes they are put to? Sure. Can I use off-the-shelf tools to take one out of the box, PXE boot it, dump a substantially system-agnostic image onto it, and get mostly-done-for-me centralized account management, configuration of virtually anything, etc, etc.? Also yes.

Android(and iOS, though Apple has been a bit more aggressive about building tools

Hmm, something for Google to really jump into, the Enterprise area.
So don't need Play Store, but 'Enterprise Store' stuff, let the admin control who has what and when.
Odd Google don't have something like this, seems the sort of thing people would pay for.

It wouldn't surprise me if it's already used that way. Many call centers already use thin clients which provide exactly a web browser and some sort of remote desktop client (VMware View or Citrix). The major remote desktop clients are already usable on Android - I've used my phone that way in a pinch.

I'd be amazed if there weren't already thin clients that were Android inside. My favorite thin client form factor is a wall socket - it goes in the wall, and has sockets for USB and HMDI - just plug in a keyboard/mouse and monitor and go.

I'd like to see Android on the PC become commercially available. We have a touchscreen laptop running Win8. Currently I'm planning to find a friend of my daughter's that needs a laptop and gift it. (Downgrading to Win7 is pointless because it has a touchscreen and Win7 touchscreen support is pretty much useless.) But I might reconsider if there were a native Android that would run on it. Assuming reasonable hardware support, and that there was a reasonable selection of Android apps that run on Intel architecture.

Why do you HAVE to smudge the screen with your finger if it is touchscreen? It still is perfectly good for displaying pictures.

It has a stylus, and we bought it initially to draw on. But flipped over in "tablet" mode, you necessarily have to deal with the OS via the touchscreen, or spend a lot of time flipping backwards and forwards between "tablet" and "laptop" mode to do stuff.

We've since gone back to a digitizer connected to a Windows XP desktop.

In summary, we bought the touchscreen laptop for a specific purpose, and, as it's failed miserably for that purpose, and the desktop performs adequately for that purpose, and we have ot

This is the final barrier to switching to it as a desktop, or laptop on the sofa. Major games. Which requires mainline hardware adoption.

When fps and mmos with big iron 3D run on this (sorry Pocket Legends, you're cool but it's the pockets bit that doesn't cut it long term!) then it's time to buy the moving van from Windows, as I did from Mac long ago. The trifecta will be on Android -- surfing, office apps, and big games. Then only price remains...and the Big Mo of cachet.

Seems sort of disingenuous to compare on the terms that you have, since Microsoft is part of that games industry you compared them to...

No doubt Microsoft is making more money than ever, but I seem to recall one specific Microsoft employee leave to form a game company because he observed that Quake was the #1 selling software application... oh yeah.. that was Gabe Newell, who started Valve and now owns Steam.

Just pointing out PC gaming accounts for nearly 1/3 of gaming revenue. The rest is shared between PS3, Xbox, Wii/Wii U and mobile. Also, the PC gaming segment is smaller, meaning that is is more profitable to make games for the PC.

Whilst the PC gaming market is not the majority of the PC market, it is no minor segment either. Definitely not one that can be ignored. Compared to a Word/Facebook user, a gamer will spend a lot more on hardware and software. Almost to the point of rivalling corporate spending

Android has basically become, like most tablets are, the modern equivalent of a thin client for the internet. And frankly, that's all a lot of users care about. It may not be the ideal of most people on/. for daily use, but I know a lot of teenage kids would be quite satisfied with that.

Android has basically become, like most tablets are, the modern equivalent of a thin client for the internet. And frankly, that's all a lot of users care about. It may not be the ideal of most people on/. for daily use, but I know a lot of teenage kids would be quite satisfied with that.

Ironically with Metro, and Secure boot, Microsoft Lets get in on the software Store, Windows look like a poor mobile device...with all the markup that comes with Intel and Microsoft walking home with a 70% Gross Margin. This is about helping to sell those failing to compete because of Price, by offering Android as an incentive...and its a good one, as Unlike Windows people want and Desire Android.

If your assertion were true then Android would have supplanted Windows a long time ago, it is available on such a broad and diverse range of devices that are generally a lot cheaper than the ones Windows is on. With its malware, security, inconsistency and performance problems it is no better than Windows, the OS most people desire is OSX.

I know you like to think that people want OS X, but the fact is People are aware of OSX and are not just not buying it...they are in fact buying it less 22% last quarter 2% this, and well Windows has been dropping sales...is it 5 quarters now or 6 with more doom and gloom on the horizon...yet Ironically Android is set to eclipse Windows installation this year Yeah! For those who still care Linux has been grabbing a little market share too. high fives all around.

When I first started to switch to mac I thought the dual boot would be a great introduction. Within a week I cleared out my windows partition and moved it to a VM. Months later I found I was only going to windows for to see that all was still working in IE and to run the occasional windows only application.

So having an Android/Windows combo may very well have the same results for many. They will think that they can have the best of both worlds and find that Android serves many of their needs quite nicely and instead of "rejecting" windows discover they just aren't using it. So instead of it being a religious conversion it will be more of a migration.

This has got to be a nightmare scenario for MS in that they know that for most people almost any OS will do. Does it have a browser, check (that will be the limit of most people's lists) does it have an easy way to watch Youtube, does it have any good games, does it boot really fast, does it have a good battery life.

You will notice I didn't put office applications in that list as most people only use those at work.

Plus the needs of us techie types are way way off most people's lists.

A lot of people remote desktop in from home to their work machine. It's not commonplace now, but about 1 in 10 people I know (friends, parents etc) have had that capability in at least one previous job, generally larger corporations.Why install office when you can just access it from your work machine at home? My job gave me a full copy of Office, but I've never installed it because it's faster to just RDP in to work rather than clutter up my PC with 12GB of office crap just to be able to use Word a

Why install office when you can just access it from your work machine at home? My job gave me a full copy of Office, but I've never installed it because it's faster to just RDP in to work rather than clutter up my PC with 12GB of office crap just to be able to use Word and Excel three times a year.

1. because it's a bad idea to mix your work and personal documents?2. because you have to spend time transferring the docs from work to your personal account3. because if you lose your job, you won't be able to open any of your documents4. because using a remote display introduces lag

if you use it 3x, you should just pick an online free solution (such as google docs).

I use google docs for all my personal documents, and save local copies for anything important. RDPing in to my work machine is easier than maintaining two sets of work documents on two machines. If you work in a regulated industry or for the government any files stored on the machine are cannidates for auditing by the government, I don't reccomend mixing work and home documents.

I reinstalled it with a friendly open Linux Distribution, I still cry in shower holding my knees tight and rocking trying to forget OS X. Fortunately they have managed to make their quality computing if overpriced computer products into glorified electronics devices, causing a drop in sales of 22% and 2%(more sane) higher than the rest of the PC market, fortunately there is devices like Pixel from Google to replace Apples offerings.

The history of computing is that winners emerge from the bottom up. DOS was a toy that came to destroy the mighty mainframe. Sun despised consumer level hardware, and now it has vanished, consumed by cheaper Linux and Windows boxes. Android isn't exactly ready as a desktop OS, but its mad ascent in cheap mobile devices means it should be feared.

I still use my laptop for "srs bizness" but recently, when I did some server upgrades where I would normally log in via the laptop intermittently to perform admin functions, I found myself using my folding bluetooth keyboard and my Android phone instead.

It was surprisingly productive and, being much smaller, was actually far more convenient than pulling out what felt like "big iron" to do a simple shell task.

Android now allows multiple user spaces on shareable devices such as tablets. Each user on a device has his or her own set of accounts, apps, system settings, files, and any other user-associated data.

As an app developer, there’s nothing different you need to do in order for your app to work properly with multiple users on a single device. Regardless of how many users may exist on a device, the data your app saves for a given

No they didn't. In fact I hadn't heard the term workstation for years until Microsoft Apologist are using it as an excuse for the failing desktop market (Apple Apologists use post pc). They are the same.

OTOH, Android apps run non-root which is a large part of what it took so long for Microsoft to get around to. In fact, applications run with different UIDs depending on the developer but otherwise standard Unix type permissions apply. It's far from perfect but it's not as awful as you would think.

For those who say 'I can't run GNU/Linux, I don't know anything about computers', I reply, 'If you use Android, or any embedded devices, you already have. It's not that difficult.' Android as an OS will hopefully lead the migration to GNU/Linux OS where the user has control. Right now, if you have an Android based device, you cannot even upgrade your version without the blessing of the service provider. Giving control back to the user is key. Rooting your Android device ought to be a right, not some massive struggle where you potentially void your device warranty. PC manufacturers like HP used to void warranties when clients installed GNU/LInux, not anymore. Because HP (and the like) are freaking HARDWARE manufacturers, not software, unless we're talking bios. Power to the user.

I don't think it is, to people here absolutely, but the vast majority of people don't need or want that level of control. The choice has always been there though and continues to be there but adoption of those solutions has never taken off in the mainstream environment because users simply do not care.

I'd like to see some real, hard facts to back up these assertions. The constant rhetoric from the "I'm the real geek" crowd on/. is that "most people" (grandma, sister, uncle Jim...) only care about looking at Facebook and YouTube and other than the occasional Word document, they can barely operate a computer. I think this meme is condescending and inaccurate. Sure, there are such folks, but I highly doubt they constitute the majority of PC users.

The constant rhetoric from the "I'm the real geek" crowd on/. is that "most people" (grandma, sister, uncle Jim...) only care about looking at Facebook and YouTube and other than the occasional Word document, they can barely operate a computer. I think this meme is condescending and inaccurate.

I'd be willing to consider evidence otherwise. But the sale of PCs that include Intel integrated graphics and no discrete graphics card, combined with the success of video game consoles, shows that people are in fact satisfied with PCs that can't do much more than homework and Facebook. In fact, one householder in my survey sample told me that in a cash crunch, he would cut off Internet to his household before cutting off pay TV.

The real hard facts are that while devices that provide this control are easily available and have been for many many years they are still not the device of choice for most people.

The constant rhetoric from the "I'm the real geek" crowd on/. is that "most people" (grandma, sister, uncle Jim...) only care about looking at Facebook and YouTube and other than the occasional Word document, they can barely operate a computer. I think this meme is condescending and inaccurate.

PC manufacturers like HP used to void warranties when clients installed GNU/LInux, not anymore.

Just a year or so ago I bought my wife an HP laptop specifically for a sysadmin class where she'd be installing Linux on it. Got it home, had a question for HP about it, and discovered in the process (from the phone support) that installing Linux would void their warranty. Checked the paperwork: Yep! So we returned it to Staples for a full refund and went with something else.

I call bullshit on your whole line of thinking. No-one who professes lack of computer knowledge would ever say they can't run "GNU/Linux" - the only people who actually say "GNU/Linux" are RMS-worshippers.

Anyway if you want to go down the path of calling distributions with GNU userland tools "GNU/Linux" Android doesn't qualify, because it doesn't give the user GNU userland anyway. It uses the Linux kernel, but that's irrelevant to a non-technical user. They could swap the kernel out for anything without users even noticing as long as the Android userland is moved across.

For the right price ( $500), I'd be more than happy with a lightweight Android "netbook" sans Windows. I can keep my Windows and Linux systems at the office in our VMWare cloud for software development and use an Android based VNC/RDP or Chrome Remote Desktop to access them. For everything else I typically do, "there's an app for that". To me, having a keyboard on Android would be big plus.

What you want is an Asus Transformer, but that might be out of your price range. There are two other ways to go about this. You could find a netbook that Android-x86 supports, or you could add a Bluetooth keyboard to any Android tablet.

... I would like to have a version of Eclipse or Netbeans that I can run ON AN ANDROID. I have an Asus Transformer tablet and keyboard. I'd like the option of writing code for the Android on an Android.

To have Android as a desktop OS only proves Microsoft right about many of Windows 8's design choices. I'm not saying it does not have its niche, but Android is not going to replace Windows, OS X or your favorite Linux distro.

Android, as is, has the reputation of being a resource hog. I do not have enough experience to wholeheartedly agree, but I understand the reputation (Emphasis on interpreted code over natively compiled executables, some experiences with high-end phone hardware lagging - even my very sho

No it kind of doesn't it runs on on very basic hardware..the first phone it sold on was the HTC dream. it 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7201A ARM11 processor, 256 MB ROM, 192 MB RAM and 320 x 480 px, 3.2 in (81 mm). Lets face it it will run well on these Windows 8 hybrid devices, Which are vastly overpowered for Android.

I was going to refute every (lie) point but this is my favourite "To have Android as a desktop OS only proves Microsoft right about many of Windows 8's design choices", and can't help but find it hila

Yep, check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Md9b6XbVtQ [youtube.com]
Oh sure, it's slow as balls, but considering the CPU in that phone was probably about the speed of an 8088 or something...runs pretty well.

To have Android as a desktop OS only proves Microsoft right about many of Windows 8's design choices.

... Windows 8 gets a lot of flak for Metro, despite having the desktop available, even on crippled RT (which still allows IE and Office, and possibly select third-party software in the future, besides all native OS functions).

Perhaps the interest in Android as a big-screen OS does offer confirmation that Windows 8's UI isn't totally broken. That in turn is confirmation for my thesis that what people hate about the 8 UI is the way it infantilises the user. Fisher-Price colour scheme and a vocabulary including words like "charms" indicate that Microsoft's target user is about 7 years old. The reaction against the 8 UI is a reaction against being patronised and infantilised.

Sure, Android can get a desktop-oriented interface, but why should it?

Remember Logitech Revue? This device had an Intel x86 Atom processor, USB 2.0, Honeycomb and Google Market. It was a great product, but was a commercial flop, not because it was flakey as hell... but because nearly all the apps you wanted to run only ran on ARM processors.

The second issue is that Android, and iOS, are really only suitable for unitasking, which is really only workable for content consumption.

The third issue is that if I have a device capable of running something more demanding then Android,

I think it would be neat if you could run Android applications on a vanilla Linux distribution. Remember Microsoft's 16-bit WOW (Windows on Windows)? Why can't we do something just like that to run Android applications on a stock Linux system?

Gnome is aweful, they took away one of the biggest and most useful things for Desktop computing - minimizing. Until people stop kidding themselves that people don't need minimize Gnome 3's Shell will never gain true adoption.

The current gnome and kde offerings are so awful I find myself preferring to use my Android phone, despite the tiny screen, awful keyboard, and limited functionality. It's just plain easier to use. And more intuitive. Or I use my win 7 laptop... but once IT switches that to Win 8 I'm going to be very very unhappy.

Still trying to find a Linux environment I like. I got by for some years on Fedora 10 and Windows XP, but those have pretty much reached the end of their life. The Mint stuff seems promising; but

The current gnome and kde offerings are so awful I find myself preferring to use my Android phone, despite the tiny screen, awful keyboard, and limited functionality. It's just plain easier to use.

Why? No one is forcing you into using GNOME 3 on Linux. I sure as hell won't touch it and I've been a Linux user since 2006 (maybe a year or two more if you consider dual-boot configurations and my learning period...).

Still trying to find a Linux environment I like. I got by for some years on Fedora 10 and Windows XP, but those have pretty much reached the end of their life. The Mint stuff seems promising; but MATE and XFCE had some bugs, and lacked configurability. I think with maturity these may improve. It's sad when Windows is more configurable and less buggy than Linux. But right now it is true. I lost track of how many Linux distros I've installed in the last year.

That's another point entirely; first GNOME 3 kept you off Linux, now you're saying no desktop on it is good enough. Which one really is it? Either way, I'm pretty sure Windows has its own share of bugs and lacks things the others don't have, so really, it all evens out in the end.

I don't want to have to be a beardy sysadmin just to get a system running and keep it up. I hacked it for years and you know what? I've decided I have better things to do with my sparse free time. I want something that just works, out of the box, without a silly learning curve, without having to use google as a user manual just to do basic stuff that takes one or two clicks on Windows. If I hack I want to do it for fun, not necessity.

I'm not a hacker; hell, I don't even know how to code--and I can run Linux just fine. And maintenance? What maintenance? I have had to do very, very little maintenance on my machines since switching to Linux. No defragging, no regular clean-up to keep the system running fast, no anti-virus/spyware/adware/trojan/worm/you-name-it software to suck up resources and have to keep updated. System update? Just download and burn the latest ISO, nuke the old / partition and install there. When the system is installed, that's about it; it's ready to go with all user settings intact. Maintaining Linux has been a dream compared to Windows.

Still trying to find a Linux environment I like. I got by for some years on Fedora 10 and Windows XP

Not going to argue about the first sentence since that is a personal thing and I respect you for it. However Fedora 10 (Dec 2009), you do realise that Fedora 18 is the latest although fedora 19 is going to be out in about a week. No matter what distribution you like be it Fedora or Debian based the basics have not changed although it is up to the individual to decide on what GUI they are comfortable with be it KDE, Gnome, xfce etc. While i am not a Linux developer I am a Professional IT Engineer and I can w

The point is that both Android and Gnome 3 are better desktop OSs than Windows 8.

Most importantly, Android is outselling Windows by a large margin, and will pass its installed base very soon. MS can't rely on using their OS dominance to leverage format lockin any more. People will want to interchange their documents, spreadsheets etc with phones, tablets, and yes, Android powered desktops. If Microsoft still refuses to play nice and maintain compatibility, they will be seen as the weak option and will risk

I would sure love to have some of the drugs your smoking! Seriously, people always make the mistake of assuming that it is Windows that is keeping the Microsoft money pit going. Sadly, for the alternatives, it's Office itself that is the key to Microsoft dominance. Not a single alternative out there for MS Office has 100% compatibility with Office, all the moving parts of Office, not just the document formats (which nobody gets right to date). Since Office only runs on Windows, MS gets to sell a lot of copies of Windows. Workers, for now, have to keep a copy installed on their home computers so they can get work done outside office hours, if you have the luxury of having real office hours, which means that a lot more copies of Office get sold along with all those copies of Windows.

Yes, there are ways to get around the no Office on anything but Windows (or Mac for a niggling few percentage points) but for the typical, must be appliance-like (or automobile-like) in terms of usage, Linux hasn't been there yet. [Yes, I know Crossover Office and Wine but they ain't appliance-like.] However, there's a huge camel's nose under the Microsoft tent in the shape of tablets and other light-weight devices. The form-factors aren't great but they are easier to cart around when you have office-crap fall into your lap out of the office. Microsoft knows this, or they seem to occasionally act (ir)rationally around this. The solutions are "the cloud" to get you that MS Office-like experience (Office 365) and/or VDI.

Unfortunately for MS, they don't seem to have a clue on either the marketing or the pricing. Those two solutions pretty much only work for larger firms, not your smaller businesses let alone a mom-and-pop. [Have you ever seriously priced Cloud Backup? Including infrastructure costs? Heart Attack!] Equally unfortunate is that there are no cheaper alternatives in sight that actually cross the Office-clone on Android, iOS, whatever divide. VDI licensing costs are just simply absurd, let alone the licensing restrictions per device on top of all the other costs.

I'm not the only one thinking damn hard about this mess. What the fuck do we recommend to SOHO's, SMB's, hell even SME's around BYOD and making all the pieces work together without breaking the bank either in capital or hell, just recurring operating costs? Microsoft has essentially written off an everyone except the few firms that buy in huge bulk (via Software Assurance). Everyone else gets to talk to we VAR's and get to deliver the financial bad new. Thanks for nothing Microsoft.

I'm going to see about getting one of these combination devices. I can already do Android on any of my Windows boxen so that ain't new. And Windows 8 is the first desktop that I haven't immediately done a rip-&-replace desktop crap to something more reasonable, but I've been doing that for decades (Amigan here;-). What I don't appreciate is throwing shekels Microsoft's way when they are the source of the problem, not the source of a (hell any!) solution./rant My sincerest apologies.

Citation needed. We use Office in our office, with devs and designers on Mac, PMs on Windows, sysadmins on Linux/OSX/Windows, and clients on Windows mostly. We have no issues sharing, editing, and otherwise using documents across platforms.

My wife has Word for Mac. (On a Mac, strangely enough.) Whenever she edits (or, I think, even merely opens and saves) a particular biannual report that I produce, and then I open it again, some paragraphs have lost the spaces between words. Sothereareparagraphsthatrunonlike this.Butothersseemtobefine. And the problem seems to occur with random paragraphs (or sometimesjustphrases) throughout the document.

It's not just my copy of Word (on Win7). At least two other people are involved in t

So what you actually mean is "Either Office for Mac has a bug causing it to collapse some sentences incorrectly, or Office for Windows has a bug causing it to display sentences collapsed incorrectly." not "Office for Mac is incompatible with Office for Windows."

As someone that uses KDE programs in Gnome, my view is that what in the end could matter are compatibility layers, the ability to run the apps you like in the environment you like. Maybe android is not the most comfortable environment for desktop, but i would not complain if i can run its apps in i.e. gnome 3, if that the environment you prefer. That is one of the strenghts of linux, one base OS, apps that runs on different environments and devices, and the ability to run in one environment apps from another. That way i had the possibility to run WebOS apps/games in Maemo [maemo.org], or X apps on Mir [slashdot.org].

So, maybe i would or not run android on desktop linux, but probably will want to run its apps.

Why [Samsung] haven't added an option to try force [multi-window mode] on an app is another question.

Probably because Samsung doesn't want to lose the license to include Google Play Store and the rest of the Gapps. Please see the replies from Google engineers in a Google+ thread linked from Andy Dodd's comment [slashdot.org].

I think it's awesome that you're using a highly customized $47 Android device to base your opinion about Android on, comparing it's performance and use to $600 iOS devices. Guess what - they aren't equals. This says a lot less about Android than it says about your reasoning capabilities.

Why do you insist on seeing things in terms of dollars? What I'm using has better specifications in terms of CPU speed, amount of RAM, and GPU power, than the $600 iOS device you are implying that I own. (What I own in terms of iOS actually cost less than $600 when I bought it some years ago, and it has less RAM than the MK808B).

As the other commenter says, you're really comparing apples to..well, sticks here. A tiny, slow device with hard power limitations is going to be fairly jerky and stuttery for many tasks. But as you also say, that doesn't mean they're not useful for a lot of stuff.

A modern Android phone or tablet is a completely different beast from your neat USB stick. Of course, the price and power requirements are completely different too. We have both Android and Apple devices aplenty at home, so I've had plenty of opp

I think the comparison of the two mobile operating systems on this basis is a lot fairer than claimed: my iOS device is an iPhone 4, which runs a Cortex-A8 (a lesser performer than the A9) clocked at about 800 MHz (about 65% of the Android stick's freq.), has 512 MB RAM compared to 1 GB of RAM in the Android stick, and a GPU which is also clocked slower - though I am not familiar with more detailed performance differences between the PowerVR and Mali400 GPUs.

Though you're driving a larger screen. And I suspect a lot of the performance difference lies in things such as the memory and storage speeds. That's where a lot of the price tag difference comes from, I suspect.

I think MS has a better chance of killing android than the other way around. But why should they? They make a killing off it.

"Think" is not good enough, Android right now is the most dominant OS for both Tablet and Smartphone, Markets that Microsoft(and Apple) have been in for forever (Androids first device was in 2008). Right now the chances are your Android devices outnumber your Windows Devices...and this year Android is set to overtake windows as the Dominant OS.

Before Windows 8 (And Surface) I too may have scoffed at the idea of Microsofts Desktop Monopoly been threatened by lets face it a phone OS. Ironically now PC's come

My Nexus 7 tablet running Android 4.2 has an on-screen button to the right of "Home" to bring up screenshots of the five most recently used applications, and the list scrolls. A similar menu shows if I pair a ZAGGkeys Flex keyboard, hold the Alt/Option key, and press the Tab key a few times.